Answers to the questions we were asked on the webinar
Q: If we were doing our disaster recovery plan in house, who would own it?
A: DR plans should be owned by the IT Function. The CIO (not so much the CTO) or the IT Director will ultimately be responsible for it. Key systems and their recovery capability will sit with the technical stakeholders that maintain a given system. For example, the effective recovery of a specific application will need to be owned by the application support team.
Q: Prevention is better than cure – so does the recovery plan cover this too? Obviously none of us would like to have to use DR but understand how critical it is. But what about minimising the risks?
A: If I could give this question an award I would! You’re SO right! Prevention is always better than cure, especially when it comes to best practice infrastructure and security design. The less fundamental mistakes that are made, the greater the chance of your business mitigating a cybersecurity ransomware attack. Of course, irrespective of how well you design your infrastructure and protect your data unfortunately sometimes bad things just happen – mother nature takes no prisoners and environmental challenges are increasing as the climate change continues to accelerate. And in the cybersecurity world, zero-day exploits can devastate your business irrespective of the security controls you put in place.
Our Recovery Plan won’t update or modify your infrastructure however it will identify areas where you should re-architect or update. You can action these recommendations yourself, or you can work with our team to get you there. Recovery Plan is both the first step and the map to take you to your destination of a reduction in business risk and a better sleep at night.
Q: How often do you recommend testing your DR solution?
A: You should test your Disaster Recovery plan ideally multiple times a year. And you should test individual applications to make sure you can bring them back. Going through end-to-end disaster recovery scenarios is good practise too.
Q: Is cloud solution only possible for DR?
A: The cloud has increased flexibility around choosing a recovery site for your disaster recovery environment in terms of available regions. The cloud allows you to pay for resources when you are using them. Or you can pay-as-you-go. However, you can choose an on-premises recovery site. Just bear in mind that the recovery site will need to be a reasonable distance away from the main Production site. So an environmental disaster doesn’t affect it.
Q: What is the best RPO you are able to offer? And what is the best RTO you can offer as part of your solution design?
A: Actually Full Recovery is underpinned by Cohesity with its highly secure immutable file system and support for a wide range of protected sources. The solution we designed will give all businesses (irrespective of their size and budget) the chance to both backup their business and recover it.
This solution is about helping every business navigate the challenges of ransomware regardless of how much they can invest in data protection. Because of this Full Recovery does asynchronous replication up to near zero.
That said, some of our wonderful customers need an RPO of zero and YES we deliver this with synchronous replication. It’s a different target customer and a different price range but what’s important to know is that we can provide the full spectrum of RPOs depending on your needs.
RTO can be from zero, if it’s initiated by our customer. But invoking disaster recovery is more challenging than clicking a few buttons. That’s why we recommend 4 hours. So our team can white glove support your business as we run though the predefined and agreed recovery plan from start to finish.
Q: And what is the approximate cost of provision of your services?
A: Costs will generally depend on how much data you have to backup at your production site and the resources you need at the recovery site. Therefore, you would pay a monthly amount for data backups but only pay for the usage of the recovery site when you were using it. You would also only pay for the resources (in terms of vCPU, memory and storage) utilised in the recovery site when the site is active i.e. during disaster recovery testing or invocation. 10 days use of the recovery site is included free of charge each year.
Q: How do we handle large amounts of data transfer between iomart data centres?
A: We have ultra high capacity transport that exists between our iomart data centres.